Identifying Your Prospects and Personas

Long before you make your first dial, you will need to do extensive research into what verticals you should be targeting. A vertical is a specific market that will find your product or service appealing as opposed to a broad sweep approach.

This market type might be smaller but more accessible as you can craft your message more specifically.

Once you identify the right verticals for your product or service, you can then prioritize your outreach accordingly.

Industry Type

One of the mistakes companies often make is to target industries that they want to penetrate but have little to no track-record in working with. Unless you have strong data indicating that you should go after a new industry, then we recommend you stay away from idealistic industries as they can distract you from your short-term sales goals.

Company Size

Another layer to consider is company size.

Imagine this: You are a fisherman who makes his living bringing in deep sea tunas. But you also have aspirations of whale hunting.

Should you spend a majority of your time focused on chasing high-value whales up and down the coast with hopes of bringing one back and cashing the fortune? Or should you just focus on the consistent tuna harvest?

You don’t want to spend all your time whale hunting and you still need to bring some fish back to the market to sell. You also don’t want to waste your time chasing minnows.

The same applies to your appointment setting outreach.

You may have high hopes of closing a large software license deal with the Fortune 500. But more often than not you will be distracted chasing larger leads trying to get past gatekeepers and spam filters, when your smaller and more accessible leads are being neglected (and being closed by your competitors).

Deal Size

The lower average sale price per product, the more appointments you will need to set on a monthly basis and the more activity you will need in your pipeline.

Keep that in mind as you think about the potential deal size for your appointment setting outreach. If you target smaller companies, your deals will likely be smaller and not worth the investment of a dedicated appointment setting team.

When targeting an enterprise-level company, the deal sizes will be much larger. However, with this comes more hierarchy and bureaucracy that your appointment setting team will have to navigate through. These companies will have more gatekeepers and hurdles to get through.

Additionally, larger organizations will have multiple departments overseeing similar functions which might make it more difficult getting the right person on the call.

Finally, for enterprise-level companies with larger deal sizes, the evaluation period will often be much longer which means that your SDR team will have to spend more time, and make more touches, in order to convert them to SQLs.

Understanding Your Floor and Ceiling

With this in mind, it’s important to establish a floor and ceiling for your deal size. If your selling price is too low, then you may not be able to justify the cost of an appointment setting effort.

If you find yourself dealing with a low ASP, you may want to consider a marketing effort such as email automation to speed up the touches your appointment setting team would normally call through.

Integrating marketing campaigns with an SDR outreach can be a very effective way to quickly touch a large database.